Vehicles such as automobiles carry electrical equipment such as door mirrors and navigation systems. Such electrical equipment can include a speech recognition device and can be operated by a driver verbally. According to the disclosure of Patent Literature 1, for example, an image recognition circuit judges the presence-absence of the opening/closing motions of a driver's mouth by means of image recognition. A door mirror control circuit disclosed therein is arranged to permit mirror face angular adjustment with respect to the contents of the instructions to be analyzed by a speech recognition circuit during a time period in which the opening/closing motion of the driver's lips was judged to have been present by the image recognition circuit and to inhibit mirror face angular adjustment with respect to the contents of the instructions to be analyzed by the speech recognition circuit during the time period in which the opening/closing motion of the driver's lips was judged to have been absent by the image recognition circuit. With this arrangement, it is possible to prevent the mirror face angular adjustment from being effected by malfunction associated with voices of a co-passenger other than the driver or noises.
According to the disclosure of Patent Literature 1, the door mirror control circuit is arranged to invalidate the results (contents of instructions for mirror face angular adjustment) of the speech recognition when the presence-absence of opening of the mount is indicated “absent”. Consequently, when the image recognition circuit recognizes speech unassociated with the motion of the mouth, it makes the judgment of “no utterance”, whereby accuracy of speech recognition is deteriorated.